Guetta, Kiki

(208 words)

Kiki Guetta (Kiki is the nickname for Jacob in the Arabic dialect of Tunisian Jewry) was born in Tunis on February 15, 1882, and died there in 1970. During the Belle Époque and in the years following World War I, he was a star of the artistic and musical stage in Tunis. He performed skits in mixed French and Arabic, sometimes in Hebrew, and introduced his largely Jewish and Arabic-speaking audience to entertainment genres that came straight from Paris, such as light-hearted songs, puns, and plays on words in French and Arabic. Tunisian Jews knew about parody; but Guetta innovated as a typ…